Several months ago on the radio there was an interview with a scholarly-type fellow regarding the origin of laughter in pre-humans. Sorry about the series of words ending with the phoneme /o/ in the previous sentence; one of the twins from the prior post still lingers.

The interviewee theorized that the earliest instances of what would evolve into modern-day laughter resulted from the following scenario: one among a group of our ancestors recognized a perceived threat as a false alarm. Naturally, this discussion motivated me to draw a line on a piece of paper.

Here we have my guess of what a person’s Susceptibility To Being Dominated (STBD) is over a span of time encompassing a moment of perceived threat. To clarify, while a person’s susceptibility is partly a function of things outside their state of mind, such as their surrounding environment, this plot only represents that portion of susceptibility which depends on the sensitivity of their threat detection, something they control directly. All other variables, i.e. surrounding environment, are assumed to remain constant. Additional assumption: a person’s STBD is inversely related 1:1 to the sensitivity of their threat detection.

The leftmost horizontal portion represents a person’s STBD under normal or average conditions. Where on the y-axis this line meets differs from person to person, but should remain flat for everyone. Moving right along in time, the line dips suddenly when a threat is perceived, rises sharply when that threat is recognized as a false alarm, and finally commences a graceful exponential decay back to normal. Notably, a person is more susceptible to attack immediately after recognizing a perceived threat as a false alarm than they were before perceiving the threat.

What’s exciting about this plot is that, though it was drawn with respect to a physiological process, similarly shaped plots can be found in electronics, where the y-axis may represent voltage across a circuit element, or in control systems modeling, where the sharply unstable transient portion is followed by an exponential decay to steady-state (in a stable system).